The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Read online

  “Eat up, Shoot,” Henry said. “Rations goin’ down.” He slipped two potatoes into his pocket, before loading his tin plate with slices of ham. I followed his lead and slid two potatoes into my own pocket.

  We piled the food onto our plates, mounding it into little hills to fit on as much as possible. To a man and to a woman, the slaves ate ravenously, leaning against the walls of the sugarhouse, or sitting on the ledge in front of the kettles, barely talking as we did so. We ate plateful after plateful, each of us going back for more as if we could somehow swallow away the entire grinding season, its long days, and the seemingly endless labor.

  As the food disappeared Jeff the fiddler came out and stood on the ledge in front of the kettles. He raised the instrument and stuck it under his chin, poised the bow over the strings before striking a note and stamping his feet and wheeling his way into a lively tune. Soon the floor filled with dancing couples, men swinging their women around and around, and women’s skirts flying out, like fully opened morning glories.

  We had been left to eat alone and in peace, but once the music started Master Wilson and the missus paid us a visit. They stood to the side, Wilson delivering a benevolent smile and occasionally clapping his hands to the tune, his wife holding on to her husband’s arm as though she might fall into a faint. Missus Lila looked worse than she had at Breech’s funeral, her face still a caved-in looking thing, falling in on itself like a spoiled apple. She tugged on Master’s sleeve and said something to him, and after a short time of standing there and being seen, and receiving more of the Bless you, Massuhs, and Thank you, Massuhs that he so craved from us, Wilson led Missus Lila out, and up the lane to the big house, the full moon lighting their way. I watched them as they left, Wilson round and sturdy with Missus Lila tottering along beside him, occasionally stopping to lean down and catch her breath.

  I looked for Chloe, even though I did not expect to see her. The house slaves did not mix with the field slaves, and even if that had not been so, I was sure that, as nurse to Missus Lila, Chloe would be held back and kept in the big house. But still I looked. I could not help but looking.

  A girl asked me to dance, and I went out on the floor and swung her around. And then another girl asked me to dance, and I swung her around. I danced quite a bit, with many girls, and I could feel, as I held each girl’s hand, the rough calluses of grinding season in her palm. I learned their names that night. Jenny, Bea, Louisa, Alice, Linda.

  The moon marched across the sky, full and bright, its light casting whiteness to the ground outside, making it look like new snow. I stepped out into it to catch my breath. I saw a group of men gathered in a circle around a fire, a jug being passed around.

  “My man, Shoot,” Henry hollered from across the fire. “Come on over here. Give yo’ thirst a drink. You got the gals after you tonight, don’cha?”

  I laughed. “Don’t know, Henry.”

  “Mmm-hmmm.” That was Sup. He took a swig on the jug and passed it to me. “This child’s got it bad fo’ that gal Chloe, work in the big house takin’ care of the missus.”

  “Best stay away from her,” another man said.

  “What’d you hear?” I asked.

  “Massuh Wilson’s,” he said simply.

  “Fo’get ’bout her, Shoot. Don’t be courtin’ trouble. Here. Take another swallow.”

  I stayed and drank a little before wandering back into the sugarhouse. I was standing at the table, gnawing the marrow out of a bone, when I felt a tug on my shirttail. I looked down to see Peach, the girl who’d brought us our meals out in the fields.

  “You Persy?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She crooked her fingers and wiggled them toward herself, indicating that I should lean down. “Chloe say fo’ you to meet her,” she whispered in my ear, “in the quarters. You in that last cabin? With Sup?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That what I told her.”

  The full moon made the whitewashed cabins shine. A thin trail of smoke rose from Harriet’s cabin next to mine. As I hurried down the lane, Chloe stepped out from the shadows, pulling her arms close around her and holding them to her chest. “Come in,” I said.

  Inside I built a fire to take the chill off and while we waited for the air to warm we stood in front of it, holding our hands out to its heat, our breath puffing in clouds between us.

  “I brung you somethin’,” Chloe said, reaching into the pocket of her apron, pulling out a small book and handing it to me.

  I folded my fingers around it, feeling its cloth-covered binding, and the warmth on one side where it had pressed against her body. It had been a long time since I’d held a book in my hands, or a woman. “Chloe,” I said. I took a deep breath. We both knew the rest of what I was about to say. She shouldn’t have done this. It was dangerous to steal a book. She had taken too great a risk. “Won’t this be missed?” I asked. “Won’t you?”

  “Massuh don’t read,” she said. “Only Missus read and she too sick to notice. She sleepin’.”

  “What about Wilson? Is he sleeping too?”

  “He gone. Took off to see a fella next place over.”

  “There’s no place to sit,” I said apologetically, sweeping my hand in the air, showing her the four pallets nailed against the walls.

  “Which one yo’s?” she asked.

  I pointed.

  “That’ll do.”

  She sat on my pallet. I laid another log on the fire and then sat beside her, turning the book over in my hands, not able to read its title for the feeble light inside, and the fear and the excitement I felt at sitting next to her again, unchained this time.

  “I have something for you too,” I said, and I pulled the blue ribbon from the last cane plant out of my pocket and handed it to her. “It’s not much.”

  She took the ribbon and fingered it lightly.

  “It’d look pretty in your hair,” I offered.

  “I cain’t take it. Massuh see I got it and want to know where from.”

  I nodded. “Missus Lila will notice this gone when she gets well,” I said, holding the book up.

  Chloe shook her head. “She ain’t gonna get well. I know it. Everyone know it. Massuh know it.” She lowered her eyes to the ground. “Missus dyin’, Persy. I don’t think she dyin’ fast enough fo’ him, or fo’ her either. I never been in such a house as this. Feel like the whole world jest waitin’ on her to pass over.”

  I leaned against the wall behind me. I remembered all too well the death of Master Surley, and the auction of his estate where I had stood alone on an overturned crate, for sale as a single unit. But perhaps little would change if a mistress died rather than a master. How dense I was, how ashamed I am now to think of it.

  “You supposed to be at the party,” Chloe said.

  “No one’s going to miss me there.” I reached up and brushed a strand of hair off her cheek. “Does he bother you?”

  She shot back quickly. “What it matter to you what he do?”

  “It matters,” I answered. “I just can’t do anything about it.”

  “Then maybe it best you don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders and looked away from me.

  In that moment I envied the wild animals whose first thoughts in danger are always of flight. A wild animal will chew its own leg off to get free of a trap. My instincts told me to go ahead and chew my leg off, to run, to take Chloe to a safer place, but there was no safer place to go to. Big plantations, water, white folks surrounded us. Our only recourse, I thought, would be to live in the swamps as Sup had told me some were doing. A wild animal would have taken Chloe there.

  “They might miss me soon,” Chloe said. “Missus might wake up needin’ somethin’.”

  I nodded. She leaned over and kissed my cheek, and pressed the blue ribbon back into my hand. “I cain’t keep it,” she said. “I wish I could. It real purty.”

  “It’s all right,” I answered.

  I put my arm around her, and we fell together onto
my moss-stuffed mattress. Our coupling was desperate, made as much of fear as of heat. Fear and heat tangled together into a stew of passion. We were afraid, not just of getting caught, but of never being able to make this choice again. We pulled at each other’s clothes. We tugged each other’s bodies closer. We thrust and we pressed into each other until it hurt, and until it released that hurt.

  The ribbon drifted to the floor. The book Chloe had given me slid with a thump off my pallet. The potatoes I had stolen at the party rolled out of my pocket and lumped softly across the uneven planks toward the fireplace.

  Afterward Chloe fell asleep in my arms, and I pulled the thin gray blanket that had been issued to me over her shoulders to keep her warm, and watched the firelight flicker across her face. That sleep. I wanted it to last as long as she needed it to. And when she woke up I wanted to wind our fingers together and talk quietly and softly, the way I’d heard my mother and father talk together in our cabin at the Surley place. I wanted to see morning with Chloe, but she could not be missed in the big house. We could not be caught together like this.

  The fire sputtered and gave one last flicker of flame before it bent itself to glowing coals. I heard drumbeats starting up outside the cabin. It sounded like many drums and the beating was at first disorganized, but gradually it coalesced into an unrelenting rhythm.

  I did not know it then, but many of the men who had been on Sweetmore for several years had used their weeks off at the end of grinding season to make drums out of barrels and hollowed-out logs with animal skins stretched taut across them. Now they were gathered around a fire, beating on those homemade drums, harder and faster and wilder, while some of the women danced, gyrating, moving to the rhythm as though the drums were inside them. I would experience drumming and fires with the Comanche, but before that night the only drumming I had heard was at One-Eye’s hanging, a solemn beat on a single drum as he was led out of his cell with his hands tied behind him, into the waiting crowd, and up the steps of the scaffold.

  Now Chloe stirred and woke. “I gotta go,” she said. She pulled away from my embrace and hurriedly began picking up her clothes and putting them on. “That drummin’ gonna wake Ol’ Miss. Mean ol’ thing, she scared to death of everythin’.” She buttoned the bodice of her dress, and tied on her apron, and plunked the little frilly cap that house slaves wore back on her head. Then she sat down beside me again and pulled on her stockings and shoes and began lacing them up.

  The fear of getting caught was thick and palpable in the air now. It hung in the room like the heavy smoke from the pine-knot torches at the sugarhouse party. The drumming outside was becoming wilder and wilder, and only now do I imagine how the sound of this drumming must have felt to the white people as they lay in their beds in their big houses, surrounded as they were by all their trinkets and fine linens and gleaming wood and delicate china and silver polished by dark hands. How frightened they must have been that their slaves were becoming African again.

  “You took a big chance,” I said as Chloe laced the last of the grommets on her shoes.

  She leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I selfishly tugged her back onto the bed, our lips meeting. She pulled away quickly and smoothed her hair. “I take a chance again, Persy,” she said. “How I look? Not too messied up, I hope.”

  I sat up and tucked her hair behind her ears, and she leaned forward and kissed me once again. She stood and crossed the cabin floor. The sound of the drums leaked in louder as she opened the door, and then muted as it thudded softly behind her.

  After Chloe left, I got up and dressed. I picked the potatoes off the floor and brushed one off and ate it, and then I ate the other one. I stoked the fire and kicked up the flame. Then I picked up the book Chloe had given me and by the light of the fire I read its title. Sonnets from the Portuguese. A book of poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I opened it and read a few lines.

  I thought once how Theocritus had sung

  Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,

  Who each one in a gracious hand appears

  To bear a gift for mortals, old or young

  I closed the book and ran my hands along its cover. I opened it again and smelt its pages. A scent of perfume wafted into my nose, no doubt the smell of Missus Lila in better days.

  Perhaps if I had been a different person, perhaps if I had not been born a slave, perhaps if I had been white and educated and slept in a feather bed, perhaps then I would not have picked up the green sapling we used to poke the fire, and lifted the burning log, and wedged the book beneath it. I tossed the blue ribbon in behind it, and watched it curl and blacken and turn to cinders.

  AT THE END of the week Master Wilson culled his slaves. Bessle was among the five chained and loaded into a wagon for transport to New Orleans. I stood with the others watching the wagon with its load of chattel rocking away from us along the rutted lane that led to and from the quarters. Behind me I heard Ida, the mother of another boy being carried away, sobbing. Bessle lifted his hand, chained to a man as old as his pa, and waved.

  We returned to work on Monday. My first job was hauling wagonloads filled with barrels of sugar up to the levee road, and then rolling those barrels down to the quay and loading them onto a waiting steamboat. My second job was hauling and rolling barrels of molasses. Then sugar again. All day Monday we rolled the barrels.

  And then on Tuesday I was given a task that would not end until March, digging furrows and planting cane. Tuesday and Wednesday I worked the plow, while behind me flowed a wide swath of slaves, bending and stooping, placing and then covering with dirt the sticks of cane with nodes budding on them. On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was taken off the plow and set to planting, and then it was I who followed behind, bent and stooped, a sack full of rattling cane sticks hanging across my body. Master Wilson had opened up two new fields to be planted, and we planted them, thinking of the extra work this would make for us at grinding season.

  It was now January 1861. Do not think that just because we were slaves we were ignorant of the turbulence between North and South, although the white people always did their best to keep things from us. Nevertheless, all up and down the river, these same white people talked freely with one another in dining rooms, and in parlors, with whiskey and cigars, or tea and cakes. All the time that they talked there was a slave or two standing by to serve them, to keep them comfortable, to place logs on the fire, to pour that whiskey or that tea, to snip the ends off those cigars or replenish those cakes. But lately word had been coming to the quarters by way of slaves who visited from other plantations that something had gone strange with the white folk. Conversations were suddenly checked in servants’ presence. Talk was now held behind closed doors. Voices were lowered and sometimes words spelled out.

  At Sweetmore there had always been a dearth of information, as Master Wilson and his wife entertained not at all, and barely talked with each other, certainly not on matters such as politics. But still, we learned things. We were not ignorant. Every Sunday when Jeff came to visit Sally, he brought what news he had heard, and he had heard plenty. His master was in the habit of reading the newspaper aloud to his wife, and several of the slave children had taken to hiding beneath the house and listening and memorizing and reporting what was said to their elders. It was through Jeff that the slaves of Sweetmore learned that Louisiana had left the Union.

  We weighed our odds of course, as we had always done. In my own cabin, Henry said he had heard there was talk of war, but the white folks said it would be short and quick and the South would be victorious.

  Sup mentioned a Federal invasion, but Jeff’s master had dismissed the notion as absurd. The states above Louisiana, Jeff explained, would take the brunt of the fighting and would cushion the state from any danger.

  “What about the river?” I asked.

  “Cain’t get through the river,” Jeff answered.

  “Why not?”

  “I jest sayin’ what the white folk say. Cain’t get
through the river. They ain’t gonna run short of nothin’. Goods gonna come in through New Orleans. Sugar get shipped out. I hear Massuh say two forts guardin’ that river and cain’t nobody get up there if they ain’t supposed to,” Jeff said.

  “Aw, Shoot,” Henry said. “I’m tellin’ you, they gonna work somethin’ out. You think white folk up nawth gonna do without they sugar? Without they cotton? Hell naw.”

  This is what Henry told himself, and this is what the white people told themselves as well. It might have been the only thing that Henry and the white people ever agreed on. If ever there was a safe place to be, the white people assured themselves, or a place where nothing would change, Henry said, Cane Country was it.

  And nothing did change, except that as a precautionary measure, the reins that kept us in slavery were tightened. It was not long after Louisiana had seceded that Master Wilson rallied us around him at the end of a workday. He stood again on the stoop of one of our cabins, and held his pudgy fingers up, just as he had done when he’d announced the sugarhouse party, but this time his face was a grave mask, as if to emphasize the seriousness of what he was about to say.

  “There are going to be some changes in how things are done,” he said. “Patrols are going to be increased up and down the river. Passes are going to be asked for and scrutinized. If you are caught off my property without a pass, you will receive twenty lashes, to be administered immediately by the man who apprehends you.”